Scene

The action in one place and time, made of several shots. The sentence between the word and the paragraph.

The scene is drama's natural unit: one place, one stretch of time, one turn. Something is different when it ends, a decision made, a balance shifted, or the scene has no reason to exist. Shots are its vocabulary; the turn is its point.

The sentence between the word and the paragraph carries a test worth applying beyond film: what does this unit change? Scenes that merely continue are the first cut in any tightening pass. Pages, sections and chapters obey the same law, each should leave the reader somewhere they were not.